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  Widow liked the female form so much that the reason he hadn’t done the tourist thing he always did was because of a woman, and this woman had quite the female form. Her name was Scarlet, but he hadn’t learned that until long after they’d met, not days or hours or anything, just longer than the period in which he usually learned someone’s name. Introductions were normally quick events, but not in this particular case.

  Traversing into Las Vegas, Widow had been walking on the 161 interstate after coming out of South Colorado, where he had taken three different rides, all with male drivers. All of them had been decent guys, but the last one, a middle-aged guy who had driven with him in a new black Ford Taurus like he had just bought it off the lot, took it on himself to pick up Widow instead of heading home to show his wife and neighbors his new automobile.

  The Ford Taurus driver had driven the car, with Widow in the passenger seat, for the better part of seven hours, the bulk of Widow’s trip to Las Vegas. And the guy hadn’t asked Widow to drive, not once, which was something that Widow had expected him to do. How often was it that a driver picked up a hitchhiker and then drove for seven hours and didn’t ask that the rider pitch in his fair share of work for the ride, or at least pitch in money for the gas? It seemed that driving for a few hours would’ve been a fair trade for the ride.

  The guy gave him a ride for a long distance, and that was a nice thing to do for a complete stranger and drifter. Widow had expected to take the wheel for at least half of the trip. Which was no problem for him. He didn’t mind driving. In fact, sometimes he missed it. But the guy had never asked or even hinted at such a thing. And Widow didn’t volunteer. He never volunteered for anything. That was a soldier’s basic rule, never volunteer for work, and he had been a soldier for a time and then an NCIS agent for a special operations unit in which he was undercover in the Navy SEALs.

  Undercover work in his unit wasn’t like the kind of undercover work that regular cops did. The closest type of undercover work he could think of was the DEA, because he wasn’t just undercover. His life had never been the kind where he pretended to be something he wasn’t for a short period of time until an investigation was complete. Jack Widow had become an actual Navy SEAL. He had no choice.

  The Navy SEALs is an elite operation, and there are only around two thousand members in the outfit. He couldn’t just waltz in as a mysterious SEAL that had never been seen before. He had to live the life of a SEAL twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and three hundred and sixty-five days a year. No getting around it.

  Often he had to investigate other SEALs. In order to do this effectively, he had to participate in everything they did. He had to maintain a solid reputation. He had to train just as hard. He had to be deployed to far-off locations. He had to spend time at sea. He had to do more than just blend in. He had to live a double life. But now, Jack Widow was a drifter—far from his old life.

  Las Vegas hadn’t originally been his destination, but that was where the road had taken him, and Widow was all about following where the road led because that was life. Unless he had a target or a particular reason to go somewhere, in some specific direction—but he didn’t. Not then. Las Vegas was a direction as good as any, and it was a place he had never been. And the more Widow thought about it, it seemed un-American to never go to the city of sin. Las Vegas was about as American as apple pie and guns and freedom of speech and crooked politicians.

  This was an election year, one like he had never seen before. The field had been narrowed down to two candidates from the major parties. Nothing special about either candidate, not in the presidential sense. Widow liked to consider himself a man of common sense, and to elect either one of these two candidates was the opposite of common sense. It was a bad choice all the way around. Most of the good presidents were dead.

  Widow ended up getting out of the last guy’s car on the freeway, and the reason for that wasn’t hostile, unlike many experiences he’d had in the past and many more he’d have in the future. Conflict was another part of everyday life, like love and death and streetlights and coffee.

  It wasn’t because the driver had had enough of him, not totally. It was more of a mutual agreement. They had both had enough of each other. Two men stuck in a tight space was enough for any man to understand, but in particular, it had hit close to home for Widow because from his Navy experience he knew something about being in tight spaces with other people for long periods of time.

  Widow had listened to as much of the guy’s talking as he could handle, and the guy had said about as much as he could say. They had both listened to as much silence as they could stand as well. It was like one of those times when a guy is obligated to help someone out of the civilized concept of politeness, a concept we all have to some degree. He helped Widow, but after the kindness had worn off, and time passed, and more time passed, the whole situation became a burden at first and then a nuisance and then unbearable.

  For Widow, his time in the Ford Taurus with the middle-aged guy had come to that boiling point where he would either have to ask the guy to let him out or he might have exploded on the guy and demanded he let him out. In all honesty, he was certain that the desert heat—which wasn’t that bad, not at this particular part of his journey so far—had played a factor. The new Ford Taurus obviously had an air conditioner installed, but the guy wasn’t using it. He was one of those drivers who liked the windows down, which was okay by Widow. He liked the wind in his face, rushing through his short hair, but it would have been a little more comfortable with the A/C running instead. After a while, everyone likes a little air conditioning in his life.

  Thoughts like these made Widow realize that if he hadn’t been complaining internally about the guy not using the A/C, he would’ve been looking for something else to complain about. It was, fundamentally, Widow’s unrelenting need to not stay in one place. It was true that he was in a moving car, but he had been in the same car for many hours with the same company for many hours and the same desert air rushing in.

  He had had enough.

  So the guy let Widow out near an off-ramp exit that led to a large convenience store and a red and blue gas station, an Exxon Mobil sold and then bought by a local and now called something different but still with the same colors. It lay between the dusty border of Arizona and Utah. The 389 freeway snaked into South Utah from the tip of North Arizona, turning into the 15, and then it dipped its way back down into Arizona for an expanse of road until it penetrated into Nevada.

  Widow stood, staring at the gas station off in the distance, beyond a huge sign that listed the prices of gas by the gallon, by the octane, and with the little nine at the end of each price to signal to the customer, “Hey, we round up from this penny.” It was an old trick that gas stations all over the world used. Widow had seen it everywhere. It was a trick that never really fooled anybody, but no one cared enough about it to complain. It seemed like gas stations were the only market in the world that marked prices with that little nine-tenths of a penny. Oil companies would do anything to make a buck.

  American capitalism was alive and well.

  Widow stood at the bottom of the off-ramp, considering walking up it and then down the long, winding service drive that led to the gas station in order to buy a bottle of cold water for the road and maybe have a bite to eat, or even a black coffee, which was his thing now. But his inner compass pointed him west, and his brain told him to keep on keeping on. Water was important—very important in the desert—but the 389 had enough car traffic that he didn’t worry too much about being stranded for long. It was a busy roadway, not some deserted dirt road out in the desert. And it was a weekend. Surely, he would have plenty of opportunities to get someone to stop and pick him up. Desert highways were a lot more conducive to getting rides than other spots. Maybe it was the heat or the appearance of being stranded that made drivers more willing to take a risk.

  Widow had gotten good at getting rides. Practice made perfect. Hitchhiking was like selli
ng. It involved advertisement. It involved sales talk. It involved closing the deal. He had to show drivers he needed a ride. He’d learned to use little white lies for this. Sales. American capitalism.

  Widow had perfected a few different white lies about his life in order to get a driver to give him a lift. Not something he was proud of, but desperate times and all. He preferred not to lie, which he normally never did. Not in his personal life. Then again, he had no personal life. And the life he had known for sixteen years, in the NCIS, was all about lying.

  Widow had been a double agent. He’d worked for the Naval Crime Investigative Service. Sixteen years. The NCIS was a civilian police force that policed the Marines and the Navy.

  The NCIS was about ninety percent civilian. Widow was a part of the other one percent. That one percent was enrolled in the military. Widow had spent most of his career undercover in the Navy SEALs.

  So lying wasn’t new to him. He didn’t like it, but he was good at it. If he made up harmless scenarios in order to impress a driver into helping him out, then so what? It wasn’t exactly perjury.

  One of the common white lies Widow used was that he had broken down somewhere along the road. Often, he didn’t have to tell this lie. Most drivers assumed it. They asked about it. And he would agree. Sometimes they expected to find a broken-down truck along the way. They’d assume the damn thing had stalled out on him like trucks do. Often he would nod along and say something like he had run out of gas or the radiator blew or a tire had blown and it was his spare and the car was getting towed. Any of those were plausible and understandable and forgivable and even likely.

  The best one to use was that he had run out of gas somewhere. This gave the driver the sense that all Widow really needed was to get to a service station and to a pay phone to try to get a ride back to his abandoned vehicle after he had purchased a gas can.

  A driver felt a sense of pride for helping Widow out and a sense of safety because gas stations were everywhere in America. Therefore, the distance a driver would have to carry Widow was usually not too far. How often do you drive long distances and not come across a gas station? Maybe an hour? Two at the most?

  Widow left the gas station ramp and headed west.

  HE WALKED west for a long time—and no gas station. He regretted not getting a bottle of water when he’d had the chance. It had been forty-five minutes, and he was thirsty.

  Luckily for him—and unlucky for the driver, he supposed—he witnessed a car breakdown.

  He saw a lime-colored convertible with the top down and a long slipstream of golden hair barrel past him. It was like slow motion but only lasted for about a second because right after the car flew by him, the back driver side tire blew, straight into the air.

  The lime green convertible’s tail danced and flailed and whipped from side to side. The driver struggled to keep control of the car and wound up swerving and skidding in a complete one-eighty. It stopped safely on the shoulder, front end facing Widow, pointing east from about two football fields away.

  The driver was very lucky. She had barely missed a brown Dodge Ram with California plates over in the right lane, which kept on driving even though the driver had to have seen the whole thing go down because he had started from behind her and then sped past her as she started to fishtail.

  On top of that, the driver of the convertible was obviously a woman. Not that it mattered, but Widow was from the South, and in the South, boys are raised by strong mothers. “You always stop and help a lady” had been a common theme among men from that part of the country.

  But the driver of the Dodge Ram had kept on driving—maybe he had been a she. And maybe she had thought less of the woman in the convertible because she was driving a convertible and not a truck, or maybe the driver of the Ram had been a man who didn’t care. Whatever the Dodge Ram driver’s excuse, the truck was a blip on the horizon by the time Widow reached the woman from the broken-down convertible.

  She appeared to be all of five feet one inches tall and might’ve weighed an entire ninety pounds soaking wet. She was in a kneeling position, her knees hovering about an inch from the ground, staring at her back tire. She wore white sandals with slightly raised heels, and she was tanned like she had spent the weekend at a lake or beach somewhere. She faced away from Widow as he walked up behind her.

  Terrible situational awareness, he thought.

  She wore a summer dress with an O neckline. It was short, not like a miniskirt but not far from it. It was above the knees, probably lower than the finger test in which a woman places her hands down by her sides, and if the dress comes up beyond her fingers, then the outfit fails the test. Widow remembered this test from when he was in high school. There was a semester when his school had hired a new principal, an older woman who acted like she used to be one of those old, obstinate nuns at an all-girls boarding school. She had strictly enforced the school’s dress codes on the girls at his school.

  Widow neared the woman from the convertible, waited until he was about a dozen feet from her, and cleared his throat and stomped his feet as he approached in an effort to make himself known to her, like an announcement. He knew he wasn’t the most sought-after stranger that a tiny woman would hope to stop and help her in the middle of the desert.

  She spun around so fast she almost lost her balance, but she didn’t because the fiberglass near the back corner of the car prevented her from falling when her backside scraped up against it.

  Widow said, “You got a flat.”

  She stared up at him, automatically lifting her right hand up and over her eyes as a natural visor against the bright sun.

  She said, “Yeah. I don’t know how. It just blew.”

  “I saw it. I was walking back there.”

  “Did you break down too?”

  The white lie came to Widow’s mind, but he said, “No. Just hitching a ride.”

  “Oh,” she said with that sound in her throat that Widow had heard a million times before. It was the sound of instinctive mistrust. An audible signal of danger like a scream, only less obvious. She said, “You walking out in this heat?”

  “Not much choice. It’s the only way to get to the next destination.” Widow waited for her to respond, but she didn’t. He asked, “Got a spare?”

  “In the trunk. I think there’s a doughnut tire. I never used it.”

  Widow stayed quiet and stood back. He gestured for her to open the trunk, moving his right hand slowly and steadily, making sure she could see that his movements were nonthreatening.

  She rose up, and said, “I gotta grab the keys. I left them in the ignition.”

  “Just pop the trunk, and I’ll pull the tire out.”

  She nodded.

  “Don’t worry. If you got a spare, then we’re in business.”

  She nodded again, but he could still see a hesitation in her eyes. Then he caught her glancing over his shoulder into the distance at oncoming traffic. Except at that moment, there was no traffic. The scene had gone from a car every thirty seconds to one every minute to now there wasn’t a single one. Not anywhere. Not even on the horizon.

  It was like a horror movie where a stranger appeared out of nowhere with the leading lady breaking down at the perfect spot. And Widow had appeared at the perfect moment, just when all of the potential witnesses and all other signs of life had magically disappeared.

  She said nothing, just stared at him like she was thinking the same exact thing.

  Widow said, “Go ahead. Pop it.” And then he paused a beat and said, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to give me a ride or anything. I’ll help and then move on. No problem.”

  She faked a smile and clenched her hands together out in front of her, like a nervous habit. With no other choice, she accepted his help. She turned and walked back to the driver side and opened the door and leaned in, jerking a lever that was located somewhere on the door that popped the trunk.

  Widow walked to the trunk and opened it. Inside, there was a bright orange s
uitcase, a carry-on size with wheels and a pull-out handle. It was clean with no visible nicks or scrapes or any other damage from traveling. Maybe it was new—not brand new, but somewhat new.

  He pulled it out and walked off of the gravel on the shoulder and set it on the last concrete part of the road, but still off the lane and well before the washed-out white line.

  He walked back to the car and pulled up the carpet lining. He went through the universal procedure of releasing the spare tire and the cheap jack from its screws and its plastic encasement. He lifted the tire up and closed the trunk.

  “Make sure the parking brake is on.”

  “It is,” she said.

  “Pull the keys out.”

  She did and turned back to him.

  Widow said, “Should only take a few minutes. No big deal.”

  She smiled and waited behind him with the keys clenched close to her body, the tips of them sticking out between her knuckles like a weapon, like a knuckle-duster. In case Widow tried anything less than gentlemanly, he assumed. It would’ve been simple to parry a strike from her with the makeshift weapon, and overpowering her would’ve been very easy, even if he hadn’t been trained as a Navy SEAL. She was tiny, and he was huge. Simple math. But if she had been trained well enough in mixed martial arts, then she could’ve put in a couple of paralyzing blows and made a run for it. Maybe.

  He didn’t react to her being on the defense. He simply grabbed the tools and the tire and started to go to work. After nine minutes, the old tire was off and completely flat, and the spare was on. Widow lifted the rim with its flaccid tire and tossed it into the trunk. Then he walked over to the suitcase and rolled it to the back of the car.

  He stopped and looked at her. She was still tense around him, even after he had changed the tire for her. So much for earning trust, he thought.